When you remove yourself from the exciting scrum of american culture, you realize it's not very exciting, and there is no scrum.

Like a cop in an unmarked car across the street from a meth lab, I watch America. I am not in America, but I stare at it. I stare at it all day and much of the night, compulsively, over the Internet and on TV stations I only intermittently understand and through newspapers I cannot read at all. I moved 3,960 miles east of New York, unconsciously hoping I would forget that America is there. It was a horrible plan. America became pretty much the only thing I have thought about for fourteen consecutive weeks. Which would be totally fine, I suppose, except that nothing ever happens.1

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In the United States, it always feels like everything is changing, all the time. We are constantly reminded how the world is advancing at an accelerated pace and that the state of today has no relationship to yesterday or tomorrow. But this is not true. I am starting to suspect the world is changing much less dramatically than we like to imagine. This is a confusing time to be alive, and we assume this collective confusion must be a product of how everything is eternally evolving. But separated by time and language and water, I see little evidence of this. What I see is a relatively static society that consciously confuses itself through media and interprets that confusion as progress. I did not authentically believe this was true for most of my life, but I do now. We have mediated our culture into concrete.

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For much of the summer, I occupied my mind with the NBA playoffs and the race for the presidency, both of which I was forced to follow remotely from Germany. This "remoteness" is, of course, its own kind of fallacy: Even if I were in the U. S., I still would have experienced both of these events with the same remoteness I have in Europe. I was not going to travel to Boston or Los Angeles to watch a basketball game; I wasn't going to hold a cardboard sign and hop around like an idiot at the Pennsylvania primary. But they seemed more remote, because I usually couldn't view the games (which often started at 3:00 A.M. anyway), and I wasn't having anecdotal conversations about what was happening with either political party. In theory, I thought this would be like following sports and politics during the 1950s--I'd be reading box scores and hearing sound bites from speeches and living like the fellow on the cover of Jethro Tull's Aqualung. I would technically know less, but I would understand more.

But that didn't happen at all.

As far as I can tell, my experiences with both phenomena were virtually identical to the experiences I would have had in New York. I was not more or less informed. The experiences were not more or less real. And this is because the ratio of tangible content to metacontextual coverage has become so lopsided that the events themselves have become meaningless. The basketball games I could not watch were merely links, killing time in between the splintered mass of abstract pro-basketball coverage. Obama, McCain, and Clinton were physically absent from the overwhelming majority of political discourse. I missed very little, because there was very little to miss. And here's the weird thing: Everyone knows this. Everyone agrees that most of the information we receive is manufactured filler, not some latent subterfuge that is being used to "oppress us" (or whatever). Everyone I've ever met seems completely aware that the mass media is a) too large, b) mostly bad, and c) getting worse. But the moment they redirect their intellectual gaze back to the rest of society, they forget that this is what they believe.

You know, I've been writing this column every month for something like five years, and I feel as if the vast majority of these columns have either vaguely or directly dealt with the meaning of mediated culture, usually concluding that whatever topic I was writing about was both troubling and compelling. I underestimated both of those qualities. The mass media is the single most detrimental entity within the United States right now, and it's having the exact opposite effect of its theoretically intended one--it's making people less informed and less complete. It is much more harmful than I originally perceived. But it's also more interesting than I initially realized, because the people who are most acutely aware of this problem are the same people making the problem worse. Bloggers blog about how blogging ruins their lives. Newspapers deliver insignificant reports on the declining significance of newspapers. Entourage is a commentary on shallow celebrity-driven entertainment such as Entourage. A writer named Nicholas Carr wrote a long essay in The Atlantic Monthly about how the Internet is making it difficult for people to concentrate on long essays, which was subsequently published on the Internet. I'm writing a column in a magazine that could essentially be read as an essay against magazines, and I don't think anyone will find that strange.

I don't know why this bothers me. It doesn't seem to bother other people. And it's not like this revelation is going to change my life; I'm still going to write essays and profiles and "idea!" articles, because that's a good job and an okay life. My involvement (or lack thereof) in all this is irrelevant. Yet as I sit here, across the Atlantic Ocean, browsing random online reactions to fake news I have not seen (nor need to see), I find myself growing more and more depressed about all the things I used to love. It's not difficult to be the cop in the car watching the meth lab, but you will drive yourself sad. You'll find yourself thinking, Maybe the lab will blow up. Maybe the lab will blow up. Maybe the lab will blow up. But it doesn't blow up. It just sits there, falling apart and declining in value, while the people sitting inside lose their teeth and get crazy high.

1 Because this is a magazine, there will be a gap in time between the day I submit this column and the day it appears in print. If during this gap something really tragic happens and a bunch of people die, I apologize (in advance) to all the families of the victims, who might disagree with the assertion that "nothing ever happens."